The DevOps Rebellion

If you follow the popular technology news and blogs you would have noticed them to be declaring the death of DevOps in the face of modern approaches such as Platform Engineering and Golden Path. Many of these articles begin with a straw-man argument that DevOps has introduced too much cognitive load for developers, in that they need to consider every aspect of the application lifecycle in their daily activities.

The problem with this depiction of DevOps is that it was never a prerequisite that an individual developer or group of developers be proficient in all aspects of the build-deploy-run lifecycle. Rather, it is about creating a single cohesive team, that is capable of addressing the complete array of application concerns. It is about self-sufficiency in a given ecosystem, and enabling an application team to take full responsibility for its functional and non-functional requirements.

Within any team you never expect everyone to share the same skills and roles, and the same is true for DevOps. So to challenge the practice with an argument of too much cognitive load for any one developer is disingenuous, as no single developer is responsible for all of the concerns.

This is not to say there is anything wrong with Platform Engineering or Golden Path, but rather to highlight that they are not mutually exclusive with, or an "evolution" of DevOps. They are simply a means to achieving greater consistency and separation of concerns across a given organisation.

As an exercise, the next time you read an article or blog post proclaiming the death of DevOps, think about whether there is an associated vendor or product behind it. Because the reality is that these days there is not a lot of IT news that isn't sponsored by, or promoting a vendor solution, be it either directly or indirectly.

Ultimately, the decision about what should be prescribed within an organisation should be a democratic one, that has the full support of DevOps-enabled teams. Because if you impose too many restrictions, such that DevOps is no longer possible, then you are surely back to square one.